Who Needs Men? by Edmund Cooper (book review).
With a title like ‘Who Needs Men,’ you would have thought this paperback would have been written by a woman than a male author, Edmund Cooper. However, he presents a convincing case for an Earth where the women turn on the men in the 25th century and oust them in favour of cloning and pathogenesis and regret for not killing off the remaining men and the few women who accompanied them into the wilderness of Scotland and Wales. Instead, they train exterminators, who earn their qualification by killing them and sustaining injuries in combat. They have now lost Wales. Only Scotland remains. Man is obsolete.
Pathogenesis-born Rura On her first kill, Alexander captures a boy and a woman, discovering that they belong to Chieftain Diarmid MacDiarmid’s family. Fascinated, she decides to save him, unaware that he is about to kill one of her drunken friends. She, in turn, gets the promotion but is increasingly disenchanted by the world she lives in.
When her new team encounters MacDiarmid again, her two lady exterminators are killed, and she falls for the chieftain, and we follow their adventures together instead. I did wonder why the women never renamed Fort William.
It’s a shame that Cooper didn’t explore this all-women society more, especially since he touches on the obvious lesbian situation in an adult manner. The fact that Rura could turn to a hetero-relationship so easily, considering how long this society has been going, is probably what made Cooper move the plot away from its beginning, more so as he answers the title question in the opening chapters. These women certainly don’t.
So this does make for an enjoyable read and probably inspired other writers later.
GF Willmetts
February 2025
(pub: Coronet, third reprint 1972-1977, 192 page paperback. Price: varies. ISBN: 0-340-18614-3).
